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Received 25 April 2011 Revised 27 February 2012 Accepted 23 April 2013

Effects of team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team member job satisfaction
A cross-level
Xiao-Yu Liu
University of International Business & Economics, Beijing, China, and

Jun Liu
Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
Abstract
Purpose Western research on teams has paid an increasing attention to teams emotional process and corresponding outcomes. However, there were seldom studies examining the inuence mechanism of team leader emotional intelligence on subordinate outcomes in teams, and the previous studies often neglected the team context. The aim of the study is to explore the cross-level effect of team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team member job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach Questionnaire survey on 148 team leaders and 840 team members was conducted. The paper applied hierarchical linear modeling analyses with the software HLM 6.06 to test the hypotheses. Findings The analyses on the matched sample showed that team negative emotional climate has negative effect on team member job satisfaction, and team emotional climate moderates the relationship between leader emotional intelligence and team member job satisfaction such that leader emotional intelligence has stronger effect on member job satisfaction as team emotional climate becomes more negative. Research limitations/implications First, it is a single time period study and cross-sectional research design, which limits our ability to make causal inferences about the relationships proposed. Second, team leader emotional intelligence was reported by team leader themselves, and it will be better to combine self-report and other-report measures of emotional intelligence in the future study. Originality/value This study extends the existing theory through a cross-level framework that examines how team emotional climate interacts with team leader emotional intelligence to affect member job satisfaction, thus enriches the studies on emotional intelligence and leadership, team emotional climate and team effectiveness. The study also provides evidence of group-level emotion in China, a non-Western cultural country, which enriches the existing body of studies sampling exclusively from Western cultural groups and the research of emotions in organizations at group level. Keywords Job satisfaction, Emotional intelligence, Team emotional climate Paper type Research paper
Nankai Business Review International Vol. 4 No. 3, 2013 pp. 180-198 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2040-8749 DOI 10.1108/NBRI-07-2013-0023

1. Introduction Many researchers have described the concept of happiness leading to success as the holy grail of industrial/organizational psychology (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005; Fredrickson, 2001). With the popular use of teams in organizations, cultivating high

satisfaction and high performance work teams is an important challenge for organizations. An effective team should not only have high performance, but also team members should experience satisfaction and personal growth in teamwork (Van der Vegt et al., 2001). Team member job satisfaction is an important component of team effectiveness and has important inuence on teams (Gladstein, 1984; Hackman, 1987). Job satisfaction is an attitude that an employee has to the job itself and the work environment and is the extent of pleasurable emotional feelings individuals have about their jobs overall (Hoppock, 1935). Employee job satisfaction has important implications for organizations. Previous studies indicated that employee job satisfaction was positively related to job performance and organizational commitment, and was negatively related to work stress and turnover (Bateman and Strasser, 1984; Judge et al., 2001; ODriscoll and Beehr, 2000). Hoppock (1935) suggested that leadership style is one of the key factors inuencing employee job satisfaction, hence, leader emotional intelligence may be a candidate that inuences employee job satisfaction. Emotional intelligence (EI) has been a hot topic in management theory and practice since Salovey and Mayer (1990) rst publicly proposed this concept. Many studies have emphasized the importance of leader emotional intelligence (George, 2000; Goleman, 1998; Wong and Law, 2002). For example, Goleman (1998) suggested that successful leaders always have high emotional intelligence. George (2000) also emphasized that emotional intelligence played an important role in effective leadership. Theoretically, the competency of understanding and controlling self and other emotions promotes leadership effectiveness, and emotional intelligence could enhance leaders competency of handling problems and opportunities that they themselves and the organization are facing. Supervisors emotional intelligence was found to be positively related to the job satisfaction of their subordinates (Wong and Law, 2002). But most present studies on the effect of leader emotional intelligence on employee behaviors were at supervisor-subordinate dyadic level or one level (Wong and Law, 2002; Yu and Yuan, 2008; Zhang et al., 2009). Also, though there are a few studies on the relationship between employee emotional intelligence and job satisfaction, the effect of team leader emotional intelligence on subordinates has seldom been explored. One exception was Tang and Pans (2010) study and they investigated the effect of team leader emotional intelligence on employee organizational identity and organization citizenship behavior based on team leaders and members from 70 teams of nine production enterprises. In fact, we could regard team leader emotional intelligence as an important inuencing factor on employee attitude and behavior at team level and explore the inuence of leader emotional intelligence with team context on employee job satisfaction. Meanwhile, the importance of emotions in organizational behavior has been solidly established, and researchers have begun to turn their attention toward understanding the processes and outcomes of collective emotion (Barsade, 2002). Team emotional climate is becoming a new perspective for understanding group effectiveness (Liu et al., 2008; Pirola-Merlo et al., 2002). Related to this, Elfenbein and Shirako (2006) argue that emotion is a particularly important concept for teams. The relevance and centrality of emotion to group life becomes evident when considering that many human emotions grow out of social interactions (Barsade and Gibson, 1998; Kemper, 1978). Knowing how emotions affect behavior in groups therefore is useful for understanding and predicting workgroup behavior (Druskat and Wolff, 2001). Team emotional climate is

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the perceptions of emotions and emotional exchanges that typify a workgroup and such perceptions are considered to have important consequences for group members (Liu et al., 2008). The contingency perspective of leadership is based on the idea that leadership effectiveness depends on the situation (House, 1996). However, present studies on the effect of leader emotional intelligence often neglect the team context factor the role of team emotional climate. Moreover, the existing body of studies on team emotions sampled exclusively from Western cultural groups (Elfenbein and Shirako, 2006). To sum up, on one hand, team member happiness and effectiveness are practical issues for organizational management; on the other hand, exploring the effect of team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team member job satisfaction from an emotional perspective has theoretical contributions for contingency perspective of leadership and studies on emotions at group level. This study includes both team level variables (e.g. team leader emotional intelligence, team emotional climate) and individual level variables (e.g. team member job satisfaction). This study aims to propose a corresponding cross-level theoretical model based on relevant theories and empirically test it based on 148 teams to provide evidence for team emotion research and provide matching practical management suggestions. 2. Theory and hypothesis 2.1 Team leader emotional intelligence and team member job satisfaction Emotional intelligence is a set of interrelated skills concerning:
[. . .] the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth (Salovey and Mayer, 1990).

Leadership is a process of social inuence through which a leader affects subordinates feelings, perceptions, and behaviors (Pirola-Merlo et al., 2002). Leader emotional intelligence (e.g. the recognition of subordinates emotional states, the expression of positive and negative emotions according to the context, and self-emotional regulation) can inuence subordinates emotion, emotional regulation, and motivation (Zampetakis and Moustakis, 2011). Leaders with high emotional intelligence could use positive emotions to mobilize organizational energy, accurately appraise employee emotions and use this information to activate employee emotion (George, 2000). Job satisfaction is exactly a positive emotional state that is based on employees evaluation of his or her job or work experience (Locke, 1969). Different theoretical frameworks support that leader emotional intelligence is important for subordinates attitude and behavior. For example, according to affective events theory (AET) (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996), leadership as one of the affective events at workplace could inuence subordinates attitude and behavior. Moreover, emotion labor research also suggests that emotional display in the social interaction process has an important inuence on employee behavior (Hochschild, 1983). Previous leadership studies demonstrated that leaders emotional maturity was related to their management effectiveness (Bass, 1990). Leaders with high emotional intelligence are more emotionally mature; can recognize subordinates feelings more

accurately, such as depression or stress, because they are more sensitive to their own and subordinates emotions and feelings; and are better at using supportive leadership behaviors to regulate subordinates negative emotions, alleviate subordinates work stress and let them perceive social support clearly. Also, leaders with high emotional intelligence are good at taking care of subordinates, maintaining positive emotional states, and showing respect and care for subordinates (Tang and Pan, 2010). According to social interaction theory, if a leader gives psychological support to subordinates, such as approval, respect and care, subordinates will give back stronger commitment and satisfaction (Hollander, 1979). Fisher and Edwards (1988) also found that leader supportive behavior was positively related to subordinates job satisfaction and job performance. Thus, team leader emotional intelligence promotes team members to be more satised with their job. Wong and Law (2002) and Sy et al. (2006) also demonstrated that leader emotional intelligence was positively related to subordinates job satisfaction. Thus, we propose that: H1. Team leader emotional intelligence will be positively related to team member job satisfaction. 2.2 Team emotional climate and team member job satisfaction Workgroups have been conceptualized as social entities that, over time, develop a history of shared experiences or events. According to affective events theory (AET) (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996), these experiences or events can elicit emotional reactions in the workgroup that have consequences for the attitudes and behaviors of the workgroup. Individual-level affective characteristics that members bring to their groups moods, emotions, sentiments, and emotional intelligence combine to form a groups affective composition through explicit and implicit processes. Implicit processes include automatic affective transfer processes, such as emotional contagion, feeling affect vicariously, and behavioral entrainment, that lead to the spread of individual-level moods and emotions to other group members. Explicitly conscious processes include various forms of socially induced affect, such as the deliberate creation or maintenance of emotional experience in group members through affective inuence and affective impression management. Meanwhile, individual-level moods and emotions, emotion sharing processes, and group affective composition may all be modied by the affective context in which the group is situated, such as organizational emotion norms, local group norms, and the groups emotional history. The nonaffective factors such as the intergroup context, the affect brought on by a groups physical environment, and the affective inuences of technology also inuence team emotional climate (Kelly and Barsade, 2001). The outcome, group emotion climate which has important inuence on group dynamic and group life, results from the combination of the groups affective composition and the affective context in which the group is behaving. Team emotional climate is the perceptions of emotions and emotional exchanges that typify a workgroup and such perceptions are considered to have important consequences for group members (Liu et al., 2008). When a person enters a team, he or she feels happy or depressed, relaxed or worried, that is team emotional climate. For example, a sport team that is on a winning spree will have a positive emotional climate. In this case, the team members share after each win their joy and may praise each other, and as a result, team members shared perceptions of their emotions and emotional exchanges are positive. In contrast, consider a work team with

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a demanding and harsh leader. In this case, the team members are likely to feel depressed and afraid to express true thoughts directly in the team, leading to a negative emotional climate where team members shared perceptions of emotions and emotional exchanges within the team are negative. According to affective events theory (AET) (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996), team negative emotional climate as an affective event will inuence employee attitude and behavior. Negative team emotional climate will hamper cooperation and communication within the team (Fisher and Noble, 2000) as negative emotions hinder employee behaviors (Kelly and Barsade, 2001), thus team members in a team negative emotional climate will have lower job satisfaction. On the other hand, according to Mathieu et al.s (2008) framework, team effectiveness is a function of environmental factors, design factors, group processes, and group psycho-social traits and team member job satisfaction is an important component of team effectiveness. We argue that team emotional climate is an important group psychosocial trait which can be expected to inuence group effectiveness. Maslows (1954) motivation theory suggested physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, self-actualization and self-transcendence needs to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through. The most fundamental and basic four layers of the pyramid contain what Maslow called deciency needs: esteem, friendship and love, security, and physical needs. If these deciency needs are not met, with the exception of the most fundamental (physiological) need, the individual will feel anxious and tense. According to Maslows (1954) motivation theory employees have a need to maintain good relationships with their coworkers, and whether this need is satised could inuence employee job satisfaction to a large extent. In fact, interpersonal relationship is found to be the most important factor inuencing Chinese white-collar workers job satisfaction (Hu and Chen, 2003). Team emotional climate is the perceptions of emotions and emotional exchanges that typify a workgroup and such perceptions (Liu et al., 2008) and is an indirect reection of interpersonal relationship within teams. Team negative emotional climate implies that negative emotional exchanges dominate within teams and the interpersonal relationship within the team is cold and disharmonious, which may further inuence team member job satisfaction. For example, George (1990) found that workgroup affective tone inuences group performance such that negative affective tone was signicantly negatively associated with customer service behavior whereas positive affective tone was negatively associated with absenteeism. Rhee (2007) found that more positive emotional sharing will promote more broadening-and-building interactions within the team, further improving team member satisfaction. Duffy and Shaw (2000) found that envy as one kind of negative emotion was directly negatively related to group performance, and indirectly inuenced team satisfaction through increasing social burden and hampering cohesion. Thus, we hypothesize that: H2. Team negative emotional climate will be negatively related to team member job satisfaction. 2.3 The interaction between team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team member job satisfaction Though team leader emotional intelligence may inuence team member job satisfaction as we discussed above, this inuence depends on the situation.

According to the contingency perspective of leadership theory, leader character and context character should both be taken into consideration during the social process of leadership (House, 1996). The contingency factors in environment, such as task structure, formal power system and work teams, will make subordinates show different needs for leaders and huge differences in the leadership effectiveness. For example, Waldman et al. (2001) found that perceived environmental uncertainty strongly moderated the relationships between performance and both transactional leadership and charisma. Charisma predicted performance under conditions of uncertainty but not under conditions of certainty. According to the substitute for leadership theory (Kerr and Jermier, 1978), specic situational factors can substitute or neutralize the supervisors leadership and thereby inuence the effect of team leader emotional intelligencer on team members job satisfaction. Leadership substitute variables, such as employee competence, employee autonomy need, standardized work process and method, cohesive work team, may play an important role in the leadership process and inuence the relationship between supervisors leadership behaviors and subordinates job satisfaction, morale and performance (Kerr and Jermier, 1978). When there are substitutes for leadership, subordinates needs for formal leadership decline and reduce the importance of formal leadership. Leader emotional intelligence might inuence team member job satisfaction, but because of the inuence of substitute for leadership, subordinates will have different needs for leader, and further differentiate leadership effectiveness. Team emotional climate is very important for teams and inuences team members emotional reactions tremendously. It can act as a social norm which restricts emotional feelings and displays in teams and play a role like interpersonal interaction glue to gather group members together (Barsade and Gibson, 1998). When team emotional climate is positive, positive emotional sharing will bring more broaden-and-build interactions within the team and improve members satisfaction (Rhee, 2007). On the other hand, team negative emotional climate will hamper corporation and communication within the team (Fisher and Noble, 2000) and have a negative effect on team member job satisfaction. Thus, team emotional climate as an important team context could moderate the relationship between leader emotional intelligence and team member job satisfaction. Positive team emotional climate will promote team member job satisfaction through boosting team member broaden-and-build interactions, and cooperation and knowledge sharing between each other. Thus, team positive emotional climate could be a leadership substitute, digest improper leader behaviours of low emotional intelligence leader and make leader emotional intelligence not so important. On the other hand, when team emotional climate is negative, the leadership substitute role of team positive emotional climate disappears, team members generally feel low and aloof between each other. Therefore, a team leader with high emotional intelligence will have a more signicant inuence on team member job satisfaction, while if a team leader has a lack of emotional intelligence, team members will be more likely to be dissatised about the job. Thus, we hypothesize that: H3. Team emotional climate moderates the relationship between team leader emotional intelligence and team member job satisfaction, team negative emotional climate will strengthen the relationship between team leader emotional intelligence and team member job satisfaction.

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In our study, team emotional climate and leader emotional intelligence were at team level, and employee job satisfaction was at individual level. The theoretical model in our study is shown in Figure 1. 3. Methods 3.1 Sample and procedures A total of 12 organizations in Beijing, Chongqing, Hangzhou and Handan in mainland China served as research sites for this study. The 12 organizations were located in urban centers and include server hire and trusteeship company, airline company, telecommunications company, air pressure production plant, engine production plant, agribusiness organization, regional government, etc. In order to get better collaboration from the target organizations, we rst approached the CEO or human resource (HR) director in each organization; we used multiple channels (telephone, e-mails, and personal meetings) to explain the purpose of the research and assure them of the condentiality of the responses. Once they agreed to participate, we mailed or personally delivered the questionnaires to the organization and asked the HR department to help with data collection. Teams were selected based on ve criteria: (1) the number of team members exceeded three, preferably between ve and 15; (2) team members had worked together for more than one month to ensure that the team emotional climate had formed through team-members past work experience; (3) one formal team leader was well recognized by team members; (4) the interaction of the team members was frequent, dened as interacting with each other for more than half of their working time; and (5) virtual-team and long-distance communication teams were excluded. The total response rate of teams was 85 percent and was 95 percent within teams. Completed member and leader questionnaires collected from each team were put into one envelope and labeled with a team identication number. To minimize the common method bias because of same data source, we collected our data from different sources. Team leaders were asked to report their emotional intelligence, team stage and team size. Team members were asked to report team emotional climate, job satisfaction and their demographic variables.

186

Team emotional climate

Leader emotional intelligence

Team member job satisfaction

Figure 1. The conceptual model

Team level

Individual level

The sample consisted of 151 Chinese teams with 846 team members. After we deleted teams with fewer than three members, 148 teams with 840 team members remained for data analyses and hypothesis testing. The average team size was 6.93 (SD 3.24) team members, with a minimum of three and a maximum of 16 team members per team. The effective rate with efciency was 95.54 percent. The average age of team member was 34.35 years old and the average job tenure was 12.01 years. A total of 36 percent of the team members were female. As for education, 17.19 percent had nished a high school education or below, 22.44 percent had a community college degree, 47.16 percent had a bachelor degree and 13.21 percent had a master degree or above. As for employee level, 60.47 percent were ordinary employees, 31.40 percent were at middle level, and 8.14 percent were at high level. A total of 7.43 percent were marketing teams, 6.76 percent were R&D teams, 37.84 percent were management teams, 14.19 percent were service teams, and 33.78 percent were production teams. A total of 2.03 percent were at the forming stage, 2.70 percent were at storming stage, 41.89 percent were at norming stage, and 53.38 percent were at performing stage. 3.2 Measures The survey was conducted in Chinese. Because some measurements we used were originally developed in English, we followed the commonly used back-translation procedure to translate the English measurements into Chinese (Brislin, 1980). A response scale ranging from 1, strongly disagree to 5, strongly agree was utilized in all the measures below if not otherwise specied. Emotional intelligence was reported by the team leader with WLEIS (Wong and Law, 2002). WLEIS is a 16-item self-report inventory that assesses four dimensions of emotional intelligence: self-emotion appraisal, uses of emotion, regulation of emotion, and others emotion appraisal. Sample items include I have good understanding of my own emotions; I always know my friends emotions from their behavior; I am quite capable of controlling my own emotions. The 16 items were aggregated as the indicator of emotional intelligence and the internal consistency reliability was 0.93 for this sample. Team emotional climate was reported by team members with workgroup emotional climate scale (WECS) developed by Liu et al. (2008). We picked the eight items of the negative workgroup emotional climate in this study. Sample items from this scale were the members in the team usually feel unhappy; the members of the team dont share any personal feelings with others in the team. Reliability estimates (a) for the scale was 0.88. Because team members provided ratings of the team negative emotional climate, in order to obtain a group-level score for team emotional climate and demonstrate that team emotional climate does exist at the group level, we tried to illustrate the homogeneity of within-group variance and the differences between groups. We assessed the suitability of aggregating these individual level measures by evaluating ICC(1), ICC(2) and rwg. The average rwg of the team emotional climate was 0.79, exceeding the acceptable cut-off of 0.70 identied by James et al. (1993). The ICC (1) and ICC(2) of the team emotional climate were 0.41 and 0.80, exceeding the conventional cut-off of 0.05 and 0.5, respectively, ( James, 1982). Hays (1981) suggested the minimum evidence for differences across groups would be an F ratio from an ANOVA greater than 1.00. We conducted one-way ANOVAs on individual scores of team negative emotional climate, nding that the between-group variance was

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greater than unity and statistically signicant (FnegativeWEC 4.97, p , 0.001). These results suggest that the WECS does measure shared climate perceptions and does distinguish between different groups and, thus, aggregation of the team emotional climate to the group level is justied. We used this aggregated data in the following analysis. Job satisfaction was reported by team members and measured with the scale developed by Ilgen et al. (1981). It is a single item scale and the item is In general, I am very satised with my job. Though people usually consider that only using one item to measure a latent variable is a fatal defect, Sackett and Larson (1990) found that one-item scale is without any problem if the structure of the measured variable is very narrow and participants are unanimity with the question. Previous research indicated that employee gender, tenure, education level, team development stage and team size would inuence team effectiveness and employee satisfaction (Robbins, 2005). Thus, we controlled these variables in our study. Team development stage and team size were reported by team leader. Team leaders assessed their team stage from the following ve categories derived from the ve-stage group-development model (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977): forming stage, storming stage, norming stage, performing stage and adjourning stage. We also provided a brief introduction of each team stage for the team leader. Examples include, The forming phase refers to the early stage of a groups life and is characterized by getting to know each other and establish ways of working together. Team size was obtained by asking the team leader to indicate the Number of team members in your team. 4. Results As there were both individual-level variables and team-level variables, we applied hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses with the software HLM 6.06 to test our hypotheses (Raudenbush et al., 2004). Employee gender, tenure, education level and job satisfaction were at level-1 (individual level), and team development stage, team size, team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate were at level-2 (team level). Table I shows the descriptive statistics, reliabilities and correlations among the variables in our study. Correlations of variables at different levels were computed by disaggregating the team level variables on the individual level. Table II shows the hierarchical linear modeling results for leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team members job satisfaction. We rst ran a null model with no predictors but team member job satisfaction as the dependent variable. The test results show a signicant amount of between-individual variance in team member job satisfaction (ICC1 0.34, indicating 34 percent of variance residing between persons). However, the outcomes also varied within individuals, as 66 percent of the variance in team member job satisfaction. Overall, the above results suggest that
Variables N 148 148 840 Mean 2.59 3.96 3.54 SD 0.65 0.58 1.03 1 (0.88) 2 0.06 2 0.25 * 2 (0.93) 0.12 * 3

Table I. Means, standard deviations, reliabilities and inter-correlations

1. Team emotional climate 2. Leader emotional intelligence 3. Job satisfaction

Notes: Signicant at: *p , 0.01; Cronbachs

a appears along the diagonal in the brackets

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

2 0.14 (0.11) 0.00 (0.00) 2 0.11 (0.07) 0.08 (0.07) 0.00 (0.00) 0.04 (0.07) 0.00 (0.00)

2 0.14 (0.11) 0.00 (0.00) 2 0.11 (0.07)

2 0.14 (0.11) 0.00 (0.00) 2 0.11 (0.07)

2 0.14 (0.11) 0.00 (0.00) 2 0.10 (0.07) 0.04 (0.07) 0.00 (0.00)

Control variables Individual level controls Sex Tenure Education Team level controls Team stage Team size Predictor Leader emotional intelligence Team emotional climate Interaction Leader emotional intelligence team emotional climate Variance increase because of new variable (%) 0.17 * * * (0.10) 2 0.38 * * (0.11) 10.6 2.2 19.0

0.18 * * * (0.11) 2 0.41 * * (0.12) 0.15 * (0.07) 4.5

Notes: Signicant at: *p , 0.05, * *p , 0.01 and * * *p , 0.1; estimated standard error appears in the brackets

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Table II. Hierarchical linear modeling results for leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team members job satisfaction

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HLM was an appropriate analytical method and that there was within-individual variance to be explained. To separate the cross-level from between-group interaction, the group-centering centering technique was used when testing the cross-level moderating effect of team emotional climate (Hofmann and Gavin, 1998). At the rst step, we entered control variables including individual level controls such as employee gender, tenure and education level, and team level controls such as team development stage and team size. At the second step, we entered independent variables including leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate. At the third step, we entered the interaction term of leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate. As shown in Table II, after controlling team development stage, team size, employee gender, tenure and education level, team leader emotional intelligence was positively related to team member job satisfaction (g 0.17, p , 0.10), but as the result was not signicant enough, our H1 was not supported. Team negative emotional climate was negatively related to team member job satisfaction (g 2 0.38, p , 0.01), our H2 was supported. The interaction between team negative emotional climate and team member job satisfaction was signicant (g 0.15, p , 0.05). Figure 2 clearly shows the interaction. As shown in Figure 2, the relationship between team leader emotional intelligence and team member job satisfaction was more positive when team negative emotional climate was high (1 standard deviation above the mean), but was not signicant when team negative emotional climate was low (1 standard deviation below the mean). The inuence patterns thus supported our H3. 5. Discussion 5.1 Theoretical contribution This study investigates the impact of team leader emotional intelligence on team member job satisfaction, which answers the call of exploring the important role of leader emotional intelligence on team outcomes (Bono et al., 2007; Druskat and Pescosolido, 2006; Pescosolido, 2002). This study promotes previous studies on leader
4.5

4.0 Job satisfaction

3.5

3.0

2.5

Figure 2. Interaction between leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team members job satisfaction

Leader emotional intelligence 2.0 Low High

Low team negative emotional climate High team negative emotional climate

emotional intelligence and subordinates job satisfaction at the dyadic level of supervisor and subordinates and expands it to the team level. Based on the matched data of 148 team leader and 840 team members, our results show that team negative emotional climate has negative effect on member job satisfaction; team emotional climate moderates the relationship between leader emotional intelligence and team member job satisfaction such that leader emotional intelligence has stronger effect on member job satisfaction as team emotional climate becomes more negative. Previous ndings on leader emotional intelligence and subordinates job satisfaction were not consistent. For example, Wong and Law (2002) and Sy et al. (2006) found that leader emotional intelligence was positively related to subordinates job satisfaction at individual level and at the dyadic level of supervisor and subordinates. However, there were ndings that subordinates job satisfaction was not inuenced by leader emotional intelligence (Villard, 2004; Webb, 2005). Zampetakis and Moustakis (2011) also found that team leader emotional intelligence was not related to team job satisfaction at team level. However, our results show that team leader emotional intelligence is positively related to team member job satisfaction, though not statistically sufciently signicant ( p , 0.10). Our H1 was not supported, but H3 was supported. On one hand, this result is because our independent variables and dependent variable were collected from different sources (team leader and team member, respectively) to alleviate the common source bias, thus these results of main effect tests were relatively conservative, which remains to be explored in the future research. On the other hand, this implies that the effect of leader emotional intelligence on team member job satisfaction is varied and depends on team emotional climate which is a substitute for leadership. This could explain why previous studies results of the relationship between leader emotional intelligence and subordinates job satisfaction were inconsistent to some extent. Because of the difference of team emotional climate, team leader emotional intelligence is positively related to team member job satisfaction in some teams, while team leader emotional intelligence is negatively related to team member job satisfaction in some other teams, which support that we cannot explore the effect of leader emotional intelligence on employee job satisfaction independently and we need to consider the context of team emotional climate instead. Emotion in organizations is an important issue in management practice. Hawthornes experiment (1927-1932) found that employee job effectiveness is not completely determined by work environment, but is closely related to emotions, and group norms, group emotions and sense of security determine employee job effectiveness. Recently, studies on emotions in organizations have developed quickly abroad and have recently aroused so much research interest that Barsade et al. (2003) have regarded it as an affective revolution in the study of organizational behavior. Since Salovey and Mayer rst formally introduced the term emotional intelligence to represent the ability of people to deal with their emotions in 1990, EI has become a focused and controversial topic in psychological, educational, and management theory and practice. Recently, emotional intelligence theory has been discussed and broadcast extensively, relevant measures are quickly being used widely and empirical studies on emotional intelligence are growing (George, 2000; Goleman, 1998; Tang and Pan, 2010; Wong and Law, 2002; Yu and Yuan, 2008; Zhang et al., 2009). Our study contributes to understanding the inuence of emotional intelligence on organizational management

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and behavior. Previous studies on the effect of leader emotional intelligence were moslyt at one level or leader-subordinates dyadic level. Our study explores the cross-level effect of team leader emotional intelligence on team member job satisfaction, and thus enriches leadership and emotional intelligence research. Moreover, there was an absence of group-level emotion studies conducted in non-Western settings (Elfenbein and Shirako, 2006). Our study provides new evidence of emotion research at group level in China, and enriches the research of emotions in organizations at group level. Previous leadership studies mostly investigated the internal role of leadership, and neglected group or organizational level change and process, thus there was a lack of studies on the external role and context of leadership. This is because studies in organizational behaviour were usually at two extremes of individual without organization and organization without individual and there was a lack of integrated consideration of organizational factor and individual factor together for a long time (Osborn et al., 2002). There was also a lack of study on the inuencing mechanism and context role of team emotional climate. This study addresses the above theoretical gaps and investigates the role of team emotional climate as a group context variable in the inuencing process of team leader emotional intelligence on team member job satisfaction. This study enriches our understanding of the inuence mechanism of team leader emotional intelligence on team member job satisfaction and contributes to the research on the effect of team emotional climate and the inuencing factor of team member job satisfaction. Job satisfaction as the outcome of our study is an important component of team effectiveness. Nowadays, though research on the team effectiveness is growing, there is still a lack of research addressing how to improve team effectiveness from the emotion dimension of team. This study provides a new perspective from team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate to understand team effectiveness and enriches present team effectiveness research. Our study demonstrates that team negative emotional climate is negatively related to job satisfaction and team emotional climate as a context factor plays an important role in the process of leader emotional intelligence inuencing team member job satisfaction. Leader emotional intelligence is more likely to promote team member job satisfaction when team emotional climate is negative and negative team emotional climate amplies the effect of team leader emotional intelligence on team member job satisfaction. Team positive emotional climate could substitute leader emotional intelligence, and provide guide, approval, and motivation for the subordinates, thus promoting team member job satisfaction and lessening the importance of leader emotional intelligence. 5.2 Practical implications The results of our study have certain practical implications. During the past 20 years of research on emotional intelligence, many studies paid attention to leader emotional intelligence and consider that leader emotional intelligence plays an important role in motivating subordinates (George, 2000; Goleman, 1998; Wong and Law, 2002). Our research demonstrates that the role of leader emotional intelligence in a team depends on team context. This contingency perspective provides important implications for research and management practice on leader emotional intelligence. Also, this study provides new thinking on how to improve team member job satisfaction for management practice.

First, as emotion is a particularly important concept for teams (Elfenbein and Shirako, 2006) with important effects on team member job satisfaction, more training on the emotional aspect of workgroups should be provided for team leaders and members, such as emotional management in team, emotional intelligence and team emotional climate. Team leaders need to recognize the value of team emotional climate and pay more attention to the emotional needs of individuals and the emotional linkages and relationships within the team. Team leaders also need to improve their own emotional intelligence, especially the ability to recognize others emotions and identify the change of team emotional climate accurately. Second, there is debate on whether leader emotional intelligence could be used in manager selection, training and development (Zhang et al., 2009). Our results show that team emotional climate moderates the relationship between team leader emotional intelligence and team member job satisfaction. Team positive emotional climate could substitute leader emotional intelligence and make the role of leader emotional intelligence less signicant when team emotional climate is positive. Team leader emotional intelligence plays a more important role when team emotional climate is negative. Thus, emotional intelligence could be used in leader selection, training and development, especially when team emotional climate is negative. Last, our study reveals that team emotional climate is an important management tool to improve team member job satisfaction. Team negative emotional climate has negative effect on member job satisfaction. Team leaders should try to alleviate team negative emotional climate and build team positive emotional climate, to facilitate team member job satisfaction. 5.3 Limitations and future directions There are also limitations in our study. First, it is a single time period study and cross-sectional research design, which limits our ability to make causal inferences about the relationships proposed. For example, leader emotional intelligence might also inuence team member job satisfaction through inuencing team emotional climate. But this cross-sectional study did not support this mediation mechanism. Our study shows that team leader emotional intelligence is not signicantly related to team emotional climate (r 2 0.06, n.s.). Longitudinal studies are required to explore the causal relationships tested here in the future. Second, team leader emotional intelligence was reported by team leaders themselves; it will be better to combine self-report and other-report measures of emotional intelligence in the future study. In the future studies, longitudinal or experiment research design could be employed to investigate the relationships among the variables in our study and collect more samples to further justify our conclusions. Future studies could also further investigate the difference in the inuence mechanism of leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team member job satisfaction in different kinds of teams and further explore the effect of emotional interactions within teams on team effectiveness. Specically, future research could be conducted from the following three aspects. First, team emotional climate is the perceptions of emotions and emotional exchanges that typify a workgroup (Liu et al., 2008). On one hand, team member perceptions of team emotional climate could be aggregated to get the team emotional climate at team level; but on the other hand, when team members personal emotional experiences are different or similar to team emotional climate, we could investigate

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how this similarity or difference affects team member job satisfaction. Also, we could investigate the effect of the variance of team member perceptions of team emotional climate on team effectiveness and team member job satisfaction. Second, future research could further investigate the effect of team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team member job satisfaction in different kinds of teams (e.g. at different team development stage, different team function, different team size). For example, future research could investigate the difference in the effect of team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team member job satisfaction in teams with different requirements of emotional labor. Third, our study only investigates the effect of leader emotional intelligence on team member job satisfaction, however, how about the inuence of the interaction of leader emotional intelligence and subordinates emotional intelligence on team member job satisfaction? While team leader emotional intelligence interacts with team emotional climate to inuence member job satisfaction, is it possible that leader emotional intelligence also inuence member job satisfaction through inuencing team emotional climate? Besides team leader emotional intelligence, how does the team leaders leadership style and emotions combined with team emotional climate inuence team member job satisfaction? How does team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate inuence the organization through individuals and teams? These are interesting questions that future research should address. Acknowledgements We use the words team and workgroup interchangeably in this paper. The popular management literature has tended to use the term team, while the academic literature has tended to use the word group (Cohen and Bailey, 1997). Groups vary in their degree of groupness, with some groups being more interdependent and integrated than others. Some authors have used the label team for groups that develop a high degree of groupness (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993). Barrick et al. (2007) suggest that a team that is with high interdependence is a real team and a team with low interdependence is a workgroup. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 71002003), and Program for Young Excellent Talents, UIBE (Grant Number 13YQ04).
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Further reading Cohen, J. (1988), Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., Eribaum, Hillsdale, NJ.

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Mayer, J.D. and Salovey, P. (1997), What is emotional intelligence?, in Salovey, P. and Sluyter, J. (Eds), Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications, Basic Books, New York, NY, pp. 3-31. Tschan, F., Semmer, N.K. and Inversin, L. (2004), Work related and private social interactions at work, Social Indicators Research, Vol. 67, pp. 145-182. Wright, T.A. and Staw, B.M. (1999), Affect and favorable work outcomes: two longitudinal tests of the happy-productive worker thesis, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 1, pp. 1-23. About the authors Xiao-Yu Liu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior, Business School, the University of International Business and Economics. She got her PhD degree in Human Resource Management from the Renmin University of China and her doctoral research was carried out in a joint-PhD program with visiting study at the Department of Management, Monash University, Australia. She was also a visiting scholar at Fisher Business School of Ohio State University between August 2011 and February 2012. Her current research focuses on emotions in organizations, leadership and employment relations. She has published in such journals as Human Relations, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of Management and Organization, Journal of Organizational Change Management, and Asia Pacic Journal of Human Resources. Xiao-Yu Liu is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: rainy306@163.com Jun Liu is a Full Professor in the Department of Organization and Human Resources, School of Business, Renmin University of China. He received his PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was a visiting scholar at Sauder School of Business of The University of British Columbia between November 2012 and May 2013. His recent work focuses on leadership, employment relations, and issues of Chinese top management teams. He has published in such journals as Administrative Science Quarterly, Human Resource Management, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, and Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

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